inviolability of its members, and the penalty of death against any one who should attack their liberty."

was given over to the old cabinet as a relic of the past.

From The Spectator.

THE THOUGHTS OF A MAORI CHIEF.

The memorable 14th of July quickly followed, which saw the fall of the Bastille. Mr. Crosse, wearing the tricolor cockade, had the satisfaction of standing on the ruins of this stronghold of THE Weekly Press, a sporting jourdespotism! The thin crust of the nal, of Christchurch, New Zealand, in volcano on which the squire had danced appearance something like the Field, and flirted in the bridal days of Marie published in December, 1892, a series Antoinette had veritably fallen into of papers of some intellectual interest. the gulf of Nemesis, leaving society They were the component parts of an itself gasping for very life in the fumes essay by Apirana Turupu Ngata, a leadof sulphurous fires. ing chief of the Maoris, containing his The next page of history, with sans-views on the past and future of his own culottism for its heading, had not yet unhappy people, the first essay, it is been turned when Richard Crosse left believed, ever written by a Maori of France a wiser and a sadder man. It unmixed blood. Apirana, though edutook him the best part of a fortnight cated at a local university, and full of to get from Paris to Somersetshire, English knowledge, remains a native in counting the passing visits he paid, feeling, in sympathies, and in aspiraaccording to the fashion of the time, at tions, and his whole utterance, which is the Hobhouses, the Jenkyns, and the often singularly eloquent, and always Whites, whose houses lay on his route. free from the Indian taint of unreality, Ere reaching the deep-set lanes on is penetrated through and through by a Quantock-side, the squire, who, by kind of reflective horror of the white the way, had been high sheriff of the man, who, he nevertheless clearly percounty two years before, found he had ceives, in the inevitable conflict of their to reckon with his neighbors the town- destinies will ultimately and speedily folk of Bridgwater. Somerset gener- stand a victor and alone. His thoughts ally, and particularly this place, was are all sombre, and almost all worthy of vehemently anti-Jacobin. Republi- attention. He does not, indeed, though cans, levellers, and flaming democrats," he evidently exults in the Maori past, were amongst the terms applied to all add much to our knowledge of its dereformers alike. They stimulated the tails. He accepts the theory of EuroTory fervor by taking oaths of loyalty pean inquirers, that the Maoris are to king and Constitution, and by occa-probably either Malays or members of sionally burning in effigy their political a race forced to emigrate by the Malays, opponents. Being in this temper, some who, after a long residence in the Naviof the more zealous defenders of the gator Islands, set sail under some unBritish Constitution resolved to stop known impulse for New Zealand, and Mr. Crosse on his way home, and smash there grew and prospered and develhis carriage. The incident of the tri-oped, what, for want of a better word, color cockade, and his presence at the we may call a polity. The only thing fall of the Bastille, had got noised he adds to the best English accounts is about, and Bridgwater was in a ferment his belief, based apparently, on perof indignation. A friend in the hostile sonal investigation, that the islands, camp gave timely warning, and the when the Maori adventurers landed, traveller quietly took another route, and were not uninhabited, but contained a thus prevented the malcontents of few people of some Negro, or rather Bridgwater from indulging in a foolish Negrito, race, whom the invaders conbreach of the peace. The tricolor cock-quered, absorbed, and, as it were, civade, of no use in a country where lib-ilized, who are still recognizable by erty is sought through law and justice, their faces and certain peculiarities of

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pronunciation, and who still form the | chief, in spite of all that has been taught tribe holding the land round Taupo and them, remain savages still. "The feelthe lakes. It was to be expected that, ings and motives that influence the as an antiquarian, Apirana Turupu Maori's inner and more private life toNgata, would be more or less of a copy-day are the same that influenced him ist, though his references to his own ages ago, though tamed and refined by legends, as supporting the European conformity to European customs, by story, have a value of their own; but contact with European civilization, and he has often quite distinctive thoughts. by the far-reaching influence of ChrisOne of them, in particular, is well wor- tianity. Your Maori of to-day is but thy of missionary attention. There is the savage of yesterday, polished and a tendency among the new missionaries draped in English finery. Within him to rely for success chiefly upon the there are raging the fierce passions that ethical teaching of Christianity, or upon but a while ago made him revel in the atonement it offers for sin; but slaughter and cannibalism. His hands Apirana, though a Christian himself, are bound with the manacles of civilbelieves that the attraction of the new ization and humanity, but they are creed for his countrymen consisted restless to grasp once more the spear, wholly or mainly in the miraculous the taiaha, and mere. Outwardly he career ascribed to Christ, which struck accepts the truth of Christian teaching, their fervid imaginations, always and worships the Pakeha's god most haunted by desire for the supernatural; reverently, but his mind is governed by and that the great relapse of the tribes, superstition, his secret longings and and the spread of the creed called Hau-natural tendencies are towards. the tohauism, was due to the gradual wearing hungas, the only visible monuments of away of this interest, and the new his old priestly régime." No indelible stimulus offered to the craving for awe impression has been made upon the by the miracles related by the native Maori mind, nor can the surface imprespriests. That is a singular statement, sion be deepened, for to deepen it there revealing as it does one whole side of must be contact between the Maori and the savage mind, and we wish Apirana the Pakeha, and in that contact is the had dwelt upon it longer; but he wan-destruction of the weaker race. There ders away almost at once to that which evidently fills or, if we may say so, chokes his mind, the decay and, as he thinks, approaching extinction of his heroic people.

is no hope in religion, says the chief, for the religious teachers of to-day have lost all touch with the inner life of the Maori, and no hope in education, though in itself the best of all things,

- for education does but take mental tone out of a Maori. Full as he is of hatred for the Pakeha, the latter still

In spite of their slight recent increase, which he acknowledges as an accidental fact, the Maoris are dying, he says, of contact with the white man; and noth-tyrannizes over his imagination, still ing can save them but a miracle, which compels him towards a degrading imitawill not arrive. His only hope is for the tion of his ways of life, still draws him survival of a few who may be elevated irresistibly towards the settlements in morale as well as mind; and even in where drink and idleness and sexual that fragment, as it were, of a national vice kill out the lower people, leaving destiny, he has but little confidence. behind them only a half-caste race; Through column after column runs the upon whom the chief, with that incurmelancholy refrain of angry hope-able pride which we find everywhere essness, hopelessness almost equal to among the pure-blooded peoples, pours that of the Marquesan who regards a out, almost shrieking, the full vials of offin as the most acceptable of pres- his wrath and contempt. "Illicit innts, and makes it thenceforward his tercourse, vice, and immorality, have bed. His countrymen, says the Maori | already destroyed the purity of the race,

same

strangely obscured by metaphor if the essayist is not also dreaming of one last hopeless insurrection, in which the remnant of his people, gathered round their chiefs, should perish sword in

66

have stunted a race once famous for its | the more easily acquired customs and physique, have rooted out whatever occupations of the other." industrial tendencies survived other It is despair, in fact, which is in the pernicious influences, and degraded the chief's heart, and as it overwhelms him characteristics it once possessed of hos- it breeds only one desire, -for a repitality, liberality, bravery, and manli-sistance which may possibly be only ness. You view instead a pigmy race moral, but the idea of which is of men and women, a degenerate cross between the Pakeha and the Maori, inheriting the worst qualities of both, elevated by no sense of rank, with no dignity, possessing mental qualities that are employed for the fabrication of hand. 'Only let the chiefs see that notorious schemes; of theft, burglary, they are departing from the bravery, b murder, and crime." There is no hope, grandeur, and nobleness of their great says the chief, of improvement in this ancestors when they help on the genrespect. The Pakeha lad is a god to eral ruin; that they can retrieve their the Maori maiden, and the only remedy lost honor only by making a firm standa is the deportation from New Zealand of and rallying round them the remnants all the lower whites, a remedy which, of their people, though they be on the while he suggests it, he himself pro- verge of ruin and destruction. Then nounces to be " impossible." Educa- shall we witness a spectacle, once seen tion, as we have said, is worse than never to be forgotten, a spectacle that useless. "By educating the Maori, you will fill the heart with pity, though callgenerally render him unfit to take part ing for admiration; a race battling in the struggle for life in which his race bravely, nobly against the fates, now is engaged. You render him versatile, sinking under the leaden weight of the pliant, and yielding under the influence fear that the struggle is hopeless, now of an English mind, conceited and over-up and striking out fiercely against bearing towards his own people. It is overwhelming odds, braced with the true that the higher Maori schools have hope that the day may yet be won; the sent into the world men and women aged and the feeble trampled under who are in every way qualified to fulfil foot, the ranks for a moment wavering the duties of English subjects, who are as the black banner of death and desocially and morally equipped for the struction sweeps down once more to daily battles of life. It is true that the bloody attack; death gaining the their higher education has made them day, warriors weltering in their blood. more sensible to the good that may be leaders stricken in the bloom of manderived from industry, and has enlight- hood, yet gladly dying with the knowl ened them to the danger in which their edge that though their race is lost, it race is placed. But with all their has died hard, bravely, and nobly.” sound intellectual and moral training, they have in the majority of cases relapsed into the ways of their parents, and exerted the most evil influence by their example. Instability of character and versatility in occupation place them in a position between the Pakeha and their own race; from it they view with supreme contempt the shortcomings of the one in such matters as dress, food, and dwelling, and survey with defective eyesight only the more prominent, the more fascinating, and

The chief is possibly too pessimist. though the whole history of the Pacific seems to confirm his fears; but ever if some poor remnant of the Maoris should survive, theirs is a melancholy history, and not one easily to be ex plained. The English have not willec their destruction; and though they have brought with them strange drinks strange diseases, and, possibly owing to their superiority, new incentives to looseness of life, many races inferior to the Maori, such, for instance, as the

From The Fortnightly Review. VENETIAN MELANCHOLY.

BY J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

and

negro, have survived all those things. The Maoris are brave to a proverb, physically strong, and though, as Apirana affirms, almost incurably averse to steady industry, still they have fed themselves, while they have not, so far as history records, been attacked by any of the awful epidemics which have occasionally swept away whole peoples. The race, as the chief affirms, shows a tendency in the towns to merge, by crossing, into the greater multitude of whites, but there seems no reason why, in districts where the whites are scarcely visible, it should not at least linger on unharmed, as the Roman soldiers did in Dacia, and the Sarons who were lost in an alien popuiation in a corner of eastern Europe; as, indeed, even gipsies have done for ges in Transylvania and Roumania. There seems to be in the Maori, as in all the other Polynesian and Melaneian races, a special liability to despair, if their imagination were essential o their vitality, and when that was cowed by the obvious superiority of the atruders, they gave up with the wish live, the capacity for living. Some- November 1.-There has been a suching of the same kind was visible in cession of sad, sumptuous autumn days; the Peruvians after the first conquest; the lagoons asleep, gently heaving in has been traced, though in lower long undulations beneath the immense anifestations, among all the thin dome of varied greys, modulating from ibes of Australia; and it not unfre- the warmest violets to the coldest, slaty ently appears in the strange wither- hues; mournful pageants of sunset, gaway of conscript armies, when hanging roses and flakes of crimson fire ngaged on expeditions for which they over the whole expanse of heaven's ave no heart. It may have been pavilion. ongest among the Maoris, for they ere an imaginative people, full of the e of poetry and legend, and with a ide in the achievements of their hes like that of Highlanders. If that the true explanation, the Maori race perishing of heart-break, which has apped at once the vitality and the wale of the entire nation. Certainly is the conclusion, false or true, hich seems to us indicated by this first y ever published by a Maori chief, dirge in eloquent prose over a vaning people, once owners of New land, now only forty-two thousand

October 30, 1892. It is one of those evenings charged with an inexplicable melancholy, what the French call "indicible tristesse." Outside, upon the broad canal of the Giudecca, fog-horns are calling from sea-going steamers, now and then the weird sting of a siren, like a writhing sound-serpent or a banshee's cry, shivers from nowhere, nowhither, through the opaque mist. Is it from our own nerves, or from something altered and set wrong in nature, some unwholesome wind, some depression preceding thunderstorm or earthquake, that this sense of a profound gloom settles down quite unexpectedly ? Then all life seems wasted; the heart is full of hidden want; we know not what we desire; but an atmosphere of wistfulness is everywhere. What we have achieved, what we possess, shows dull, flat, and unprofitable. Only what we have not, or what lies beyond the scope of possibilities, gleams before the soul's gaze like a bright particular star.

rong

November 2. We go out in the gondola, Angelo, Vittorio, and I, every afternoon, and moor ourselves to a palo beyond the Porto del Lido, there where the new breakwater is being made, and one looks toward the open sea, with flocks of many-tinted fishing-boats in the far offing. Here we sit and smoke and talk a little. I read, and wine from Poggio Gherardo gurgles through the thin neck of a Tuscan flask. The expanse of water is quite smooth, with just an indefinable sense of ebb and flow. All phases of the sky are repeated on the glassy surface; and after the long, windless days we have lately been enjoying, the water itself has run crys

tal clear. One can look right down to | tide in the Adriatic. It is not dead the grassy weeds and to the bottom; water like that of a land-locked lake and where light glints through upon an but water subject to complex condi oar or whitened stake, gemmy patches tions of influx and outflow of salt-cur of aquamarine tints (such as Tiepolo rents, combined with the perpetua loved to splash for highest color-accents course of inland torrents debouching on his blues), yield infinite if tranquil through channels delved by them i pleasure to the eye. Then comes the the soft mud of the basin at points o sunset; and all the furnace of the west has long since smouldered into ashes above Padua before we regain our home on the Zattere.

least resistance and easiest access t the gaps between the belting islands The lagoon then, though it in no way resembles the sea, has a characte of change and varying motion which makes it interesting without disturbin its unrivalled excellence as a reflectin; surface.

November 3. - We rowed as usual to our palo, and let ourselves be lost, like a speck, in that immensity of sky and water. Not sea there is little feeling of the true sea here. Only messages The tide, at half past three, was run exchanged between the Adriatic and ning out like a steady stream, makin Venetia by incoming or outgoing ves- our moored boat throb with a rhythmi sels. Low lines of long, shallow isl- shudder seaward. Then came a pause ands, broken here and there by church and then a different tremor. New towers and tufted with stunted trees, shivers in a contrary direction thrille remind us that this is no more than an the keel, and we felt that the pulse c outlying piece of mainland, covered by the lagoon was turning landward. It i sheets of brackish water. There is a difficult to avoid shades of languag peculiar melancholy in this advanced appropriate to vital processes whil guard of the continent, where the speaking of this alteration in the tide rivers of the Alps and Lombardy are How can we think of it as the mechar gradually gaining on the sea, depositing ical effect of gravitation upon flui their silt through centuries. I remem- masses, when we remember how muc ber experiencing the same sadness on of animal and vegetable life over th the lagoons at Tunis, where Carthage whole of that huge area is waiting o has been utterly erased, as possibly these subtle changes? To the sense Venice will be one day also. You for weeds and molluscs, sponges, crusta get the rival mistress of the world with ceans, and worms, ebb and flow mu Rome, and only feel the desert and be equivalent to the systole and diasto the solemn expanse of lake. Towards of a mighty heart. We wrong the log evening rosy shoals of cloud float across of our head perhaps, but we get clos the sky, and take a keener hue on the sheeny deeps beneath, while between the heavens and their reflections sail ponderous battalions of flamingoes, making a third series of rose-tinted cloudlets. Melancholy and gorgeous color-richness are combined in a singular degree throughout the landscape of lagoons.

to Nature by indulging mythologic illusions, and making our nerves sens tive to what for these creatures are th conditions of existence. Then, to have not we emerged from them, ar does not, perhaps, their sympathy wit natural and diurnal changes survive i all the operations of our sentient ima; ination?

The sky was one vast dome of del cately graduated greys, dove-breaste ashen, violet, blurred blue, rose-tinte tawny, all drenched and drowned in tl prevailing tone of sea-lavender. water, heaving, undulating, swirling, no point stationary, yet without a ripp on its vitreous pavement, threw bac